London Bridge is down * QRt by PRURITUS MIGRANS * CC: BY-NC-SA

In this paper, I argue that the traditional narrative of Iphigenia’s sacrifice lies allusively behind the opening scenes of the Iliad (1.8–487). Scholars have long suspected that this episode is evoked in Agamemnon’s scathing rebuke of Calchas (1.105–8), but I contend that this is only one moment in a far more sustained allusive dialogue: both th…[Read more]

Hellenistic literature and art commemorated victories over the Galatians through a variety of analogies and allegories, ranging from the historical Persian Wars to the cosmic Gigantomachy: each individual victory was incorporated into a larger sequence in which order constantly quelled the forces of chaos. This paper explores this analogical…[Read more]

Archaic Greek epic exhibits a pervasive eristic intertextuality, repeatedly positioning its heroes and itself against pre-existing traditions. Here I focus on a specific case study from the Odyssey: Homer’s agonistic relationship with the Catalogue of Women tradition. Hesiodic-style Catalogue poetry has long been recognized as an important i…[Read more]

In this note, I highlight a hitherto unrecognized literary resonance in the climactic final verses of Archilochus’ First Cologne Epode: Archilochus parodically and subversively reworks the Homeric description of a quivering spear. This Homeric resonance caps the poem’s ongoing clash between the generic conventions of epic and iambus, while also…[Read more]

In this paper, I investigate the repetition of Homeric hapax legomena in archaic and classical Greek poetry. Scholars frequently assume that fine-grained engagement with Homeric rarities is a distinctive feature of the Hellenistic period, but I reveal the significant precedent for this phenomenon in earlier poetry. Proceeding through comedy,…[Read more]

This paper seeks to shed fresh light on the aesthetic and stylistic affiliations of Lycophron’s Alexandra, approaching the poem from two distinct but complementary angles. First, it explores what can be gained by reading Lycophron’s poem against the backdrop of Callimachus’ poetry. It contends that the Alexandra presents a radical and polem…[Read more]

In this paper, I investigate how Ptolemaic poets’ presentation of their queens compares with and relates to the practice of their major rivals, the Seleucids. No poetic celebration of a Seleucid queen survives extant, but an anecdote preserved by Lucian sheds intriguing light on Seleucid poetic practice (Pro Imaginibus 5): queen Stratonice, bald…[Read more]

In this article for sixth-formers and school teachers, I explore the story of Achilles’ heel and Homer’s likely suppression of the myth in the Iliad. Homer’s Iliad appears to acknowledge, but simultaneously reject, an alternative tradition in which Achilles was more than mortal, part of a broader downplaying of heroic invulnerability and…[Read more]

Since 2016, the academic narrative emerging from the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida, has increasingly relied on a public scholarship model to bridge the gap between institutional practice and community knowledge. Inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s legacy as an interdisciplinary scholar, these a…[Read more]

While marginalized as a juvenile medium, comics serve as an archive of our collective experience. Emerging with the modern city and deeply affected by race, class, and gender norms, comics are a means to understand the changes linked to identity and power in the United States. For further investigation, we turn to one such collective archive: the…[Read more]

It is May 2020. I am watching Kae Tempest perform Hold Your Own online. Tempest’s vocal performances are always rich in meaningful detail; from the rising semi-sung sound that embodies all the dreams and potentials of a fallible humanity to the throaty fall that
edges and softens our collapse into foolishness and self-defeat. Slipping between s…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Reseño aquí el capítulo “In the Wilderness of Forms: Ideas and Things in Thomas Browne’s Cabinets of Curiosity”, de Claire Preston, publicado en el libro de estudios mediáticos retrofuturistas ‘The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print’ (ed. Neil Rhodes y Jonathan Sawday, 2000). Los sabios y est…[Read more]

The Connections between ancient approaches to rhetoric, as found in Plato and Aristotle, the prime ancient theorists of rhetoric, and modern linguistic approaches to register and genre theory, as in Hallidayan linguistics, show continuity of thought across the centuries. They also suggest that there may be such things as universal rhetorical…[Read more]

Digital strategies are a public co-learning opportunity, not just a mechanism for pumping content into the fuel tank of the attention economy…

On the role of technical pedagogies in political struggles